


Patchwork Lovesongs for Mislead Drifters

by astraielle, ghoulaesthetics (astraielle)



Series: Your Body Is a Vessel [2]
Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: And they're not good., Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Shepard has some feelings regarding her sense of self
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-19
Updated: 2020-02-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:54:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22807417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astraielle/pseuds/astraielle, https://archiveofourown.org/users/astraielle/pseuds/ghoulaesthetics
Summary: She lets it hang in the air. “I wasn’t built for this. Not by myself and not by Cerberus. I don’t know if I’m myself anymore. I died. Not just died, but I was spaced and scraped up from a rock face on the planet below. How much of me could have been left? How much of me was built off of psych evaluations and leftover Alliance files? How many gaps were filled in to suit Cerberus? I said I wasn’t myself last night, Thane, but to tell you the truth, I don’t know how much of me there was to begin with. I don’t know if I ever knew who I was at all.”
Relationships: Thane Krios/Female Shepard, Thane Krios/Shepard
Series: Your Body Is a Vessel [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1639609
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	Patchwork Lovesongs for Mislead Drifters

**Author's Note:**

> I got a comment recently on the first work of this series, reminding me that I wrote the piece. It's a little bit rough in my eyes now, being a few years old, but I still enjoy it & the feeling I was going for. So instead of paying attention to my lecture, I wrote a sequel. I think it can be enjoyed on its own just fine, but if you'd like to see Thane's perspective on the events that led to it then I suggest you check out the first piece too <3

She wakes up and knows instinctively it’s not in her own hotel room.

The night before was somehow hazy and painfully sharp in her mind all at once. Restless while waiting on the Normandy’s maintenance to finish and unwilling to make herself anyone else’s problem, Elle Shepard decided she could afford to take a walk to some of her old haunts in the hope that it would distract her for a blissful moment. It worked, sort of—out of uniform, she was just another tired human on the Citadel drinking herself into oblivion, ignoring the oncoming Reaper War just as the politicians wanted everyone to. Few people spared a glance for her.

And then she proceeded to drink.

The new cybernetics messed with her tolerance—it was much better than before, when she was completely organic. Which meant that she had no idea what her limit actually was, and decided it was going to be whenever one of the servers decided she should be cut off. They never ended up doing that. The drinks only stopped being poured when she staggered out the backdoor into the alley and scrolled through her omnitool until she landed on Thane’s contact.

She hadn’t wanted to dial him, really, but the physical process of doing so was automatic. On some level, she knew she needed help, not just with getting back to a bed, and she wasn’t really sure where else she could expect to find it. She barely wanted him to see her like that. The rest of the crew, no matter how close they might’ve been to her, were even less desirable.

She wanted to laugh when he held her up and made sure she knew how to put one foot in front of the other. _Siha_. Right—what a complete joke. She was about as far from a divine warrior as one could possibly get. If it were even close to accurate, she wouldn’t have so much trouble trying to convince people their lives were in danger. _Useless_ was more like it. For all the good her efforts were doing, she may as well have been working on a cargo ship transporting shoelaces. That, at least, was providing something of a tangible service for the people.

Her head hurt, but not as bad as it would have before she had spent two years dead, and she suspected it had more to do with dehydration than an actual hangover. Another side benefit of being more machine than human.

Thinking about that made the headache worse.

She pulls her eyelids open slowly. The artificial morning light is pushing through the semi-sheer blinds, and by her estimates, it’s probably around ten in the morning. Her body aches, but it’s not the tiredness from a rough night out that keeps her bones anchored to the mattress.

_“Siha.”_

She’s not alone—not that she thought she would have been.

She doesn’t answer until she’s finished pushing herself up into a sitting position in the bed. Her clothing from the night before, she notes, has been mostly removed—Thane left the jeans, boots, and jacket neatly on the chair in the corner of the room. She remembered, sort of. Her body had been uncooperative with the process, but she was grateful—sleeping would’ve been even more uncomfortable if he hadn’t taken the time to help her out of them.

She shivers a bit when the blanket finally finishes falling away from her top half. “Good morning,” she says, voice still filled with gravel.

“Is it?” Thane asks evenly.

Shepard smiles, though it’s more of a grimace. “Not even close. I feel like death.”

“I can imagine.”

He’s waiting for her to set the tone, she realizes as she observes him sitting at the hotel table barely big enough for two people, sipping a mug of tea and scrolling through the news on a data pad. Waiting to see where her head’s at after last night.

It was, after all, a new level of intimacy for them both.

She liked Thane a whole lot. Loved him too, maybe. And she knew that facilitating affection like that meant being able to show off the ugly parts of herself. The trouble was, the meant giving up control, and that made Elle twitchy. You can dictate your trauma to someone in a planned speech, but until they see it with their own eyes, you can’t trust their reaction to the damage. And last night had been about as far from being in control as she could’ve gotten. She didn’t even know what to do with that side of herself, and she had been her own companion her entire life—Thane only had the last year or so. How _could_ he have any idea what to do with her in such a state? Could she even expect him to?

She lets the unformed questions die on her tongue. “How much of a problem was I for you last night?” She asks instead.

“Not unmanageable,” he says over the cup after a beat. “Not as much as you could have been,” he adds, as if it’s some sort of victory.

“That’s… good, then.” It sounds awkward, even to her.

He looks like he wants to say something deeper, but settles on “Can I get you a glass of water?” in place of whatever it was. She’s grateful, both for the drink and the excuse to break eye contact.

“I feel like I should apologize, now that I’m actually coherent,” she says when she’s finished her drink. Her throat feels better already, and the voice that comes out is closer to someone she recognizes.

He’s taken his seat back at the table again, but the tea goes ignored. “For what?” He asks with genuine curiosity. “It was a stress response, I believe. Quite understandable in your current position.”

She shakes her head. “It’s not. That’s not who I am. Or it hasn’t been for a long time.” She sits up a bit straighter. “It wasn’t your problem, at any rate. It shouldn’t have happened.”

He tilts his head a minuscule degree to the side, frowning slightly. “I would much prefer it become my problem if it meant you had someone to look out for you in those circumstances.”

She can’t help but scoff a bit. “It’s not the first time I’ve been that out of my head in public. Nothing too bad’s ever happened to me that I couldn’t bounce back from the next day.” It was true. She had survived worse, and made it back home each time. It wasn’t that nothing could touch her—she just knew how to ignore it.

Thane’s frown deepens. “I know. It’s disconcerting, _Siha_. Which is why I said what I said.”

It’s sincere. She finds herself hating it, just a small amount.

“How much do you recall?” He sounds like he’s setting aside his own tiredness for the sake of explanation. She hates that a bit too.

“Some.” She sighs. “Most. Enough.” _More than either of us prefer, no doubt._

“I see.” He’s quiet while he digests that.

She runs a weary hand through her hair, catching twice on knots between the soft reddish waves. “Do you want—I don’t know—you said we could discuss it later. I don’t know if you meant it or it was just something you said for the sake of saying it. I feel like I need to have some kind of explanation for you.” She pulls the blankets off her legs, swinging around so that they hang off the side of the bed. Shepard leans forward and braces her elbows on her thighs, peering at Thane from the side as her head drops slightly forward.

He hesitates, which is rare for him, deliberating on how to handle this. He’s out of his depth. Or maybe she’s simply projecting her own feelings of unease. It’s hard to tell.

It’s probably both.

“If you need to.” It echoes in the silence of the room, harmonizing with the sound of Elle’s heartbeat in her ears.

“I do.” She pauses. “I think, at least.”

“I don’t see myself as someone I should be proud of,” she begins softly. “I just sort of fell into a place where I happened to be someone who might be able to sort out this mess. Did you know I never even considered the Alliance until I was staring down a ten-year prison sentence?”

She chances a look at Thane, who’s regarding her with rapt attention. He shakes his head almost imperceptibly, both sets of eyelids blinking quickly as he does so. The sound of a siren is muffled through the glass. She takes a breath and goes on.

If there ever was a time to be honest, she supposes, it’s better to have it happen when sober. Who knew what could come of it otherwise?

“I was someone else entirely back then. This name—I chose it in the C-Sec station while I was still cuffed to an interrogation table. They needed something to put into the application, and it couldn’t be the person who played scapegoat for a wannabe smuggler she tried to join up with. I made a deal. I sold out a someone I thought loved me to save my own skin when I was proved wrong. He left me to take the fall for him. I never signed for that. So I became someone else instead. Lived another life, walked away from everything I knew for the chance at a clean slate. And you know what, I was good at it too. _Really_ good. And it’s easy to play a role like that and get comfortable when it feels so tailor-made. Right up until it doesn’t, at least.”

Thane is still saying nothing. He told her once that one of the best ways to pull a confession from someone was to simply wait in the stillness for them to tell you. Silence made people uncomfortable. Elle wasn’t usually so affected, but these weren’t usual circumstances, and it had been some time since she had needed to bare her thoughts like this.

“I know how to fight. I know how to do my job. And then the rules of the game got changed, and all of a sudden neither of those things applied anymore. Commander Shepard can only exist in certain parameters, you know—I meant for her to be a career soldier and nothing more. A terrorist organization resurrecting me as a machine never fit into that narrative. Convincing people that the Collectors are real and the Reapers are coming doesn’t either. But it’s exactly like how I ended up here all over again. Wrong place, right time, and somehow I’m supposed to do something to prevent hundreds of thousands of people from disappearing and dying.”

She lets it hang in the air. “I wasn’t built for this. Not by myself and not by Cerberus. I don’t know if I’m myself anymore. I _died_. Not just died, but I was spaced and scraped up from a rock face on the planet below. How much of me could have been left? How much of me was built off of psych evaluations and leftover Alliance files? How many gaps were filled in to suit Cerberus? I said I wasn’t myself last night, Thane, but to tell you the truth, I don’t know how much of me there was to begin with. I don’t know if I ever knew who I was at all.”

“And now,” she laughs hollowly, dragging her hands down her face, “and now I’m here. And I’m telling you this, because, I don’t know, maybe a part of me feels like she’s been lying to you somehow and you deserve to know. Maybe I feel guilty for dragging you down into the pit with me, pretending I’m not some farce of a human being while I get wasted in a dive bar and ignore the fact that while I’m down here, more colonies are disappearing. Maybe I want to tell you this because there’s a part of me that knows you deserve more, only I’m too much of a coward to cut the cord myself because it’s nice to let myself be weak and imagine what a normal life being cared about by someone might be like. Maybe I want to expose myself for what I am, hoping that you’ll be as disgusted with me as my own consciousness is and we’ll stop before someone gets hurt. Maybe it’s none of that but I can’t figure out the words to explain it. I don’t know.”

She stares at the ceiling when she’s done. She lost track of the original point she had been trying to make about halfway through the tirade, feeling sick with her comfort in being a false idol.

She’s aware of Thane rising and coming to stand in her orbit. His back is facing towards her, hands folded behind gently, just where his spine dips. He appears to be fixated on something outside, through the exposed ribbons of light.

“Perhaps you simply wish for someone to know you before you prepare to die again.”

She can’t tell which one of them he’s speaking to.

The line of his shoulders stiffens and relaxes a few times, like he’s trying to roll out the tension. She’s strong, but he’s a better combatant in close quarters. Even with his back turned, he could kill her in a flash if he so desired. He’s looking away, and it’s a peace offering. It’s almost a shame, she thinks. She likes the balance of _predator_ and _serenity_ in him. He leaves himself open now and it’s the latter. Three nights before, he wrapped both hands around her throat with meticulous care and restricted her respiration until she was lightheaded and drunk with lust. That was the former. The dichotomy was what kept her coming back, time and time again, each encounter always ending with her leaving more of herself with him than she intended. He wasn’t consuming her, and she wasn’t sacrificing, but she felt as though her carefully constructed life and persona was a finite resource. And finite resources were not well suited to being loved or shared.

“You want to give,” he said as if reading her thoughts, “but you have no idea if it was even yours to give away to begin with. I can’t fault you, of course, for the unease with Cerberus—any sane person would likely feel the same. Perhaps worse. But consider how many times you openly defied their requests. The fear doesn’t seem to permeate your innate sense of morality.”

“Says the dying man who agreed to a suicide mission without a second thought.” It’s out before she realizes what she’s saying.

Thane doesn’t react. “The inevitable death waiting for me doesn’t bring fearlessness or fear, _Siha_. But there’s a desire to do something worthwhile with the final years that lingers and won’t leave. It was either do something about it, or reconcile with the fact that I would be ignoring the desire. I chose the first. Maybe that’s what drives you. It’s impossible for an outsider to decide on an answer when you won’t pinpoint it for yourself.”

“I do it because no one else will,” she says flatly. “I’m in a unique position. It’s given me too much momentum to just sit on and watch what happens.”

He glances over his shoulder. “My point exactly. You said it yourself—you’re good at what you do. It’s an understatement, if my opinion is worth anything.”

“It is,” she rubs her eyes tiredly. “But I have to wonder if any of what I do matters if I can’t get anyone to listen. I don’t inspire loyalty in the masses or draw rallying cries. Which is what we need right now.”

“Is it?” The same question from earlier. He turns to face her more. “As far as I recall, your methods were what your crew needed. I found them to be suited to my request. Kolyat, I’m sure, is grateful in his own way that you are who you are. Or will be, at least, at some point in the future.”

She scoffs, doubting it very much.

“You aren’t the only one who’s spent time reconstructing themselves time and time again, hoping to find something familiar to hold onto even if it has to be generated on your own because there was nothing to begin with,” he says softly, sounding far away once more. And again, she can’t tell who it’s being directed at. “Being able to mould who that person is might even be the preferable option in such a scenario. Choice can be overwhelming, but the limits you run into are merely self-inflicted and easy to tear down if you know where the cracks are.”

She’s suddenly very interested in her cuticles, focused as intently on them as Thane is on her expression. “Whatever we’re doing—I like it. I want it, whoever the _I_ in question might be. That scares me. I’ve always—it’s always seemed like I was missing some vital part of myself that made me real. Its easier to build a wall than it is to carve something out of the same stone. People get close, I end up hurt, and then there’s no place for me to put it. I don’t know how to let you—or anyone—in. I don’t even know if there’s a door there to begin with. I’m not a real person, and I never was. I’m a machine dressed up in armour, and what’s anyone supposed to do with that? I’m fighting now because it’s the right thing to do. Because no one else will. But what comes after that? What’s in between?”

She finally meets his eyes. “What do I do when the lights turn off and there’s no one to perform for anymore? What do I do if I can’t even act in the role that I was made to fill so no one else would have to?”

“ _Siha_ —”

“And that too,” she went on, digging her nails a bit harder into the palms of her hands.“I like hearing it. That’s the problem. It just feels like—I don’t know. I haven’t earned it somehow. Or that it’s meant for a version of me that I can’t even prove exists.”

“And how,” he says in a measured voice, “would you even go about proving that?”

“I don’t know,” she admits again.”

He contemplates that for a moment before Shepard feels a dip in the mattress beside her where she sits. The sheets smelled like him before, but it’s nothing compared to the real thing. It’s lovely, and calming, and she could drown in him if she let herself.

 _What a frightening concept_.

“Not to say your perceptions of yourself are irrelevant.” He folds his hands in his own lap. “But I believe that when it comes to outside perceptions of the self, that’s not something you get to dictate. Don’t misunderstand; it can certainly be influenced by your actions. Your words. The way you carry yourself. But ultimately, how I see you will be up to me. Just as you no doubt also hold your own opinions going the other way. It’s the nature of things.”

“It’s wasted on a construct,” she sighs.

“I agree.”

Elle’s head snaps up at that.

Thane looks rather pleased with himself, as he often does when he’s successfully prodded her a bit.

“Which is why I _don’t_ waste it on a construct of any sort.”

He closes the gap between them and rests a hand on her cheek. Despite herself, she allows the touch.

“There’s no shame in admitting to these sorts of thoughts, you know,” he says, sweeping a thumb across her cheek. “I always knew you were the type to court melancholy, Elle. It’s not as well concealed as you want it to be.”

“So why not bring it up?” She offers as a half-hearted challenge.

“It’s generally impolite to bring up that sort of thing before the other party does if there’s no pressing need for it,” he shrugs. “Besides, would have have honestly spoken about it if you were confronted?”

“No,” she admitted with some difficulty. “I probably would’ve closed myself off even more, actually.”

“Stubborn,” he says, though it’s fond.

She offers a small, exhausted smile. “I have my moments.”

“You do realize that I answered your comm and came to find you last night not just because I’m acting as a member of your crew, don’t you?”

She’s back to frowning, just like that. “Mm.”

Thane sighs gently. “You’re quite real to me. That includes the past versions of yourself as well as the person you are now.”

“I don’t want anyone to see this,” she says with sudden clarity. “I don’t—look, I know that people are constant works in progress. That’s the nature of civilization. And maybe the facet of me that I show the world is someone who can be worth those kinds of feelings, but the others….” She trails off. “Thane, there’s so much of me that just feels like I’m constantly grasping for straws. Like I’m constantly playing catch-up with the rest of the galaxy in certain departments and I’ll never quite fall into the same pace as them because of it. It’s _vulnerable_. It’s ugly. That almost ruined my life once, and what if that’s the reason it’s so hard for me to get anyone to listen to me now?I don’t like the idea of someone being able to see that. Especially not someone I—”

She cuts herself off suddenly, breath catching on the word. Too much at once. Not enough at the same time. Would she ever manage to find the comfortable median so many others seem to have mastered? How laughable, that something so small could render the infallible Commander Shepard into a pile of stammers and averted gazes.

“—Care about,” she finishes instead, wincing on the inside at how artificial it tastes.

Not enough. Never enough. She didn’t know what being satisfactory to anyone felt like.

“A curious opinion, given the circumstances that we met under. Not to mention the request of mine I had for you more recently.”

She rolls her eyes. “You know what I mean. It’s different when I talk about myself. I know my own history.”

“Respectfully, I’ll have to disagree.” At that, the hand that was resting on her face slides down her arm, before his palm finds hers.

“Of course you would.”

“You’re also someone that I _care_ about,” he says, and she knows she’s being teased and refuses to take the bait. “I don’t know how much it would help you, but you should know that these moments, these thoughts—those are likely what will fill those gaps you feel.”

“I’m trying to be someone that other people can rely on,” she says in a small voice. “How is that supposed to happen when I can’t even look in a mirror and say for sure I know who’s looking back?”

Thane squeezes her hand, reassuring. “The ugly vulnerability, as you described, is part of what makes you whole. Or at least, gives you a more clear idea of what drives you. You’re adaptable. You had to be. It’s what makes me so certain about this mission ultimately being a successful one. You’re on the inside; it might not be something you can see for yourself until afterwards. Until then, you’re free to find solace in my view of you, if that helps.”

She bites on her lip, a nervous tic she’s mostly manage to stamp out over the years. “It might. I don’t know.”

“You should try it, then. There’s no harm. At worst, nothing changes. At best, you end up feeling a bit lighter.”

Their faces are close, bodies slowly coming together of their own accord over the course of the conversation. She kisses him without thinking. It’s slow, a natural progression, and unlike the night before, not meant to distract from the matter at hand. She presses her face into his shoulder afterwards, shielding her eyes from the light.

“I should’ve just came to see you when I was feeling restless last night. What I did was stupid. Reckless,” she murmurs into the fabric. “It’s what I used to do, though. On Earth, and then when I first tried to make it on the Citadel. Everyone I knew did. Get sad, get mad, go out and fill your system with substances until you couldn’t see or think straight anymore. Maybe someone hurt you, maybe you hurt yourself.” She pauses for a breath. “I think I wanted someone to hurt me. I couldn’t do it myself this time.”

“Lucky for us, then, that didn’t come to pass.” There’s a steadiness to his voice. She can hear the hum of it through his body. “Besides, coming here wouldn’t have done anything for you unless we had this conversation first, and you wouldn’t have let that happen if you weren’t already at a tipping point. We would speak of surface things. Our next move, topical news. You would have a drink or two, and offer me one, and I would decline, and depending on your state, we might even have had sex—who knows? And then we would go back to pretending there was nothing under the surface the next day.”

“You’re right. I hate that.”

He chuckles, resting a hand on her back. “I suffered through your frank observations of my emotional state when it came to Kolyat. As difficult as the ordeal was, it was necessary. I’m only extending the same courtesy your way.”

“Evidently.”

They stay like that, quiet, for an uncounted number of seconds. It’s nice, she realizes, being held like this—not that Thane didn’t happily hold her before, but this time, she didn’t feel the same twitch of need to put on her face and perform. For once in her life, Elle Shepard, whoever she was and will grow to be, allows herself to merely exist.

“We still have one more day to wait for the Normandy, don’t we?” She asks, breaking the peace temporarily.

“Just under twenty-six hours on schedule, yes.”

“Good,” she says, feeling content.

“Something planned for the last hours on the Citadel?” He asks.

“No, no,” she shakes her head as best as she can. “I just—I’d like to stay like this for a bit. That’s all. If that’s okay with you.” She adds.

He considers the proposition.

“I believe, _Siha_ , it is.”


End file.
